Abuja: Mr. Sheriff Adepoju, a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle, has expressed concerns that Nigeria’s plan to impose a N12.4 billion fine on telecommunication operators for poor service will not significantly enhance consumer experiences unless there is an investment in ‘recovery engineering’.
According to News Agency of Nigeria, Adepoju explained that recovery engineering involves practical systems that promptly restore service when network failures occur. His comments came during an interview in Abuja, as a response to the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) decision to levy penalties for service standard breaches.
The NCC’s move to update its enforcement process follows a directive by the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani. The minister instructed the NCC to implement automatic penalties for network failures within 90 days, aiming to create a stronger connection between service breakdowns and consequences for operators.
However, Adepoju argued that fines only serve as a punishment after failures, without necessarily enhancing the telecoms’ ability to rectify future issues swiftly. He emphasized that recovery engineering is essential, as networks are frequently disrupted by factors such as fiber cuts, power issues, equipment faults, software errors, and congestion during peak usage.
He described recovery engineering as a set of tools, processes, and trained responses that ensure disruptions are detected early, assigned to the appropriate team quickly, resolved safely, and communicated clearly to customers. Without this, customers face repeated cycles of trying again, unclear timelines, and ineffective customer-care interactions.
Adepoju highlighted that the NCC had reported a rise in monthly mobile data usage from approximately 518,000 terabytes in January 2023 to over 1.23 million terabytes by November 2025. Additionally, broadband subscriptions increased to about 109.6 million by December 2025, raising broadband penetration to 50.58 percent.
He noted that Nigeria’s telecom challenge is growing as demand outpaces operators’ ability to recover swiftly from routine failures. With more reliance on mobile broadband for work, school, business, and payments, inadequate service impacts more households and commerce.
In practical terms, recovery engineering transforms what occurs during an outage. Operators must quickly identify problems, have a clear internal process to assign responsibility, and restore service in a controlled manner to avoid creating new issues. Recovery engineering prevents extended outages by incorporating limits and safeguards.
Adepoju stressed the importance of customer communication as part of recovery, not just as a public relations effort. Customers primarily want truthful information and a credible restoration estimate when a network is down. Accurate updates rely on real recovery steps such as detection, diagnosis, repair, and verification, rather than guesses from customer care.
He concluded that while the NCC’s N12.4 billion penalties might increase the cost of poor service, lasting improvement requires operators to demonstrate recovery performance. This includes how quickly they detect failures, restore service, and communicate consistently during incidents. Without this recovery capability, fines will not lead to better day-to-day telecom experiences for Nigerians.
NAN reports that Adepoju’s expertise stems from developing large-scale automation systems at Oracle, where he leads service request automation to help support teams diagnose issues, route them appropriately, send updates, and deliver resolutions consistently.